Elsevier and the Neuroscience Information Framework Work Together to Improve Reporting of Research in Neuroscience Literature

Elsevier recommends authors to follow the Minimal Data Standards

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Amsterdam, November 7, 2013

Elsevier, a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services, announces its collaboration with the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF), by incorporating the Minimal Data Standards across four of its neuroscience journals.

Minimal Data Standards are a set of recommendations developed by NIF, the most comprehensive portal of available web-based resources in the field of neuroscience, to facilitate resource identification in published neuroscience articles. One of the big challenges that neuroscientists face today is that research findings reported in the literature often lack sufficient details to enable reproducibility of methodology or reuse of data. With the launch of the Minimal Data Standards, NIF aims to address this issue.

Elsevier is one of the first scholarly publishers to adopt the Minimal Data Standards guidelines. Initially four Elsevier journals will take part in the pilot: Brain Research, Experimental Neurology, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, and Neurobiology of Disease. These journals will incorporate the guidelines into their article submission process, recommending authors to include gene/genome accession numbers, species specific nomenclatures, antibody identifiers, and software details in the methods section of their articles. More Elsevier neuroscience journals will join the initiative as the pilot further develops in 2014.

Prof. Maryann Martone, Professor of Neuroscience at the University of California San Diego, and Executive Director of the Future of Research Communications and e-Scholarship (FORCE11), said, "Scientific reproducibility starts with materials and methods. We are pleased to work with Elsevier to help neuroscientists make their methods more understandable for not only humans but also machines. This pilot is a step towards changing the way we write papers to take advantage of 21st century technology for searching and linking across vast amounts of information."

Michael Osuch, Publishing Director for Neuroscience & Psychology at Elsevier said, "With our support for the Minimal Data Standards, we aim to make it easier for the community to identify the key resources used to produce the data in published studies. Neuroscience is a highly multi-disciplinary field with thousands of relevant web-based resources and data repositories. Direct linking to all of them would have been impossible without NIF's capacity to serve as a central portal."

Supporting the NIF to roll out the Minimal Data Standards pilot with the aim of developing better and more accurate resource identification within the neuroscience literature, falls within the scope of Article of the Future, Elsevier's on-going program to improve the format of the scientific article.

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About the Neuroscience Information FrameworkAn initiative of the NIH Blueprint for Neuroscience Research, the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF) advances neuroscience research by enabling discovery and access to public research data and tools worldwide through an open source, networked environment. In addition to giving access to over 200 neuroscience relevant databases and data sets, NIF hosts millions of annotations on the literature, which includes information about the reagents used in the paper, links to data, and comments about the data or arguments presented in the paper.

About ElsevierElsevier is a global information analytics business that helps institutions and professionals advance healthcare, open science, and improve performance for the benefit of humanity. Elsevier provides digital solutions and tools in the areas of strategic research management, R&D performance, clinical decision support, and professional education; including ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal, ClinicalKey and Sherpath. Elsevier publishes over 2,500 digitized journals, including The Lancet and Cell, more than 35,000 e-book titles and many iconic reference works, including Gray's Anatomy. Elsevier is part of RELX Group, a global provider of information and analytics for professionals and business customers across industries. www.elsevier.com